Developers of Wuxi-made Sunway TaihuLight are aiming to make the supercomputer run up to 10 times faster, in a bid to maintain its crown as the world's fastest and most powerful.
R&D for the next generation of the supercomputer, housed at Wuxi's National Supercomputing Center, has been included in China's 13th Five-Year Plan (2016-20) which is expected to make its debut around 2020, said Yang Guangwen, director of the center.
Developed by the National Research Center of Parallel Computer Engineering & Technology (NRCPC), Sunway TaihuLight broke the Guinness World Record for fastest supercomputer in June 2016. It is capable of performing 93 petaflops/s (quadrillions of calculations per second), with a peak speed of 125.4 petaflops/s. It was the first time a Chinese supercomputer topped the list using completely domestic technology, with all of its processors being designed and made in China.
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Sunway TaihuLight is ranked the fastest and most powerful supercomputer in the world on a list compiled by TOP500, a world renowned computer ranking project, on June 20, 2016. [Photo/nsccwx.cn] |
To date, the global supercomputing field has raised the speed peak to level E – denoting processing speeds hitting 1,000 petaflops/s – and a great leap calculation density, transmission speeds and power consumption.